Photograph © Morgan and Marvin Smith

In the 1930s, the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaigns sprang up in Northern urban centers to protest discriminatory hiring practices. Protesters would picket white-owned establishments that refused to hire blacks. Their goal was not only to increase job opportunities in the community, but also to increase awareness about the community's collective economic power. White merchants attempted to thwart these protests; businesses in Cleveland, New York City, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Newark obtained court injunctions prohibiting protestors from picketing their establishments. In 1938, the United States Supreme Court reversed the decisions of these lower courts, guaranteeing the right to picket establishments with discriminatory hiring practices. Here, civil rights leader and future Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., is leading a picket line on 125th Street in Harlem.